18 . THE REAL BERNARD SHAW
Similarly Shaw was always really more interested in his
array of hobbies—his economic studies and political free-
lancing, his tub-thumping and borough councilling, his
Creative Evolution, his spelling reforms and so forth—
than in the playwrighting devil that fortunately possessed
him. At any rate he would agree wholeheartedly that a
man interested chiefly in playwrighting would write very
uninteresting plays. A man should have something to say
before exercising the writer's craft of saying it, and Shaw,
interested in life rather than the theatre, had something
to say.
It is interesting to note how Shaw, as he became older,
unconsciously tried to dissociate his real self from his play-
writing self. Almost apologizing for being a dramatist, he
maintained he was nothing but a medium for his plays,
which were written through him rather than by him and
were essentially beyond his ken and control, accomplish-
ments inexplicable. In his experience a play, he says,
* writes itself: his job is merely to set down on paper as
clearly and perfectly as he can whatever his 'control'—to
use a spiritualist term—dictates. Such a conviction, true
or false, certainly opens the way to an infallible method of
deflecting adverse criticism, thus neatly enabling Shaw to
*pass the buck/
What, then, is Shaw first and foremost? I would say,
an amateur thinker. He revels in cerebration for its own
sake, no matter whither it may lead. There is your true
amateur, your true lover: the man who does something not
for gain and not foy fame, but simply for love of doing it,
Shaw enjoys trudging along the labyrinths of intellectual
speculation. Delightedly he shoulders the burden of thought.
The effort, the exercise, the agony exhilarate him.
Sometimes the exhilaration goes to his head. What is
Misalliance's preface On Children, for instance, but a
gigantic circle described by the reeling of a man drunk
with cerebration ? Fondly fancying himself striding straight
ahead, he lands up hard by his starting point, breathless,
exhausted, and immensely pleased* Such cerebral orgies
are characteristically Shavian, .
He even goes so far as to suggest hopefully that Man